Supporting the passions of our staff

October 24, 2016

Much is written about how to manage Gen Y. Without professing to have the answer, we think that empathy ain’t a bad place to start.

Being able to recognise that your business does better when its people achieve their professional and personal goals – and helping them achieve their ambitions where you can – has yielded incredible results for Time Out, and our staff.

In this respect, Gen Y are not that different to any other generation, really.

One of our Melbourne-based account mangers – Stefan Bugryn – is an independent filmmaker of Ukrainian ancestry, with strong connections to the Ukrainian community in Melbourne.

To some degree the conflict in Ukraine has been overshadowed by other recent world events such as Syria, Brexit. Trumped, you could say. So Stefan wanted to use his passion and talents to tell the story through a documentary – ‘War Mothers‘ – and in so doing, re-raise awareness of the conflict in Australia, and beyond.

In order to create the documentary, Stefan had committed to spending at least six weeks on the ground in Ukraine, and a further six on production and post-production. Rather than see him resign in order to pursue his passion, we put our heads together to think about how Time Out could support him.

Independent filmmaking has long been a subject of Time Out editorial, and so we are telling Stefan’s story to our audience. But we’ve also decided to help kickstart his crowdfunding campaign with a small financial contribution, as well as promote it through our platforms and social channels.

Additionally, we want his journey to be a valuable development experience and so our CEO is working with Stefan out of hours to extend business guidance and to mentor him during the process.

You can read about Stefan’s film, donate to his crowdfunding campaign, or learn more about ‘War Mothers’ through this short video: